Monday, September 28, 2009

Indeed, on 2009’s Atlantic 50 list of most influential columnists, bloggers, and broadcast pundits, almost exactly half are Jewish, even though only about 2 percent of the population is Jewish. In particular, white Jewish males are represented at rates more than 50 times higher than the average American.

Abdul Mouti Bayoumi said supplying the item was akin to spreading vice in society, a crime punishable by death in Islamic Sharia law. The device is said to release liquid imitating blood, allowing a female to feign virginity on her wedding night. The contraption is seen as a cheap and simple alternative to hymen repair surgery, which is carried out in secret by some clinics in the Middle East. It is produced in China and has already become available in other parts of the Arab world. Professor Bayoumi, a scholar at the prestigious al-Azhar University, said it undermined the moral deterrent of fornication, which he described as a crime and one of the cardinal sins in Islam. Members of parliament in Egypt have also called for banning import of the item.

It has long been a puzzle that girls who grow up without their fathers at home reach sexual maturity earlier than girls whose fathers live with them. Jane Mendle of the University of Oregon and her colleagues have suggested a possible cause: genes. Specifically, the same genes that might make a dad more likely to leave his family could be behind early sexual development as well. The researchers came to their conclusion after analysing data collected through the American National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Dr Mendle looked at 1,382 boys and girls, each of whom was related to at least one other subject through their mother. Most of the mothers were pairs of sisters, but some were identical twins or first cousins raised as sisters. The NLSY surveys asked the mothers about many things, including whether the father of their children lived with them. They were surveyed every year from 1979 to 1994 and then every second year. From age 14 their children were given annual questionnaires, and asked if they had engaged in sexual intercourse yet. What the researchers wanted to know was whether the age at which a young person first had sex was something that ran in the family — regardless of whether the father had been around or not. To find out, they compared young people who had grown up without their dads with cousins whose dads remained at home. If the environmental effect of a father’s absence was causing children to mature faster, they reasoned, that would show up. It didn’t. In fact, the more closely related the cousins were — by having mothers who were identical twins, for instance, versus cousins — the closer their age at first sexual experience, says Dr Mendle. The researchers found it was as true for boys as it was for girls. They published their work in the current issue of Child Development. Dr Mendle now suspects that the same genetic factors that influence when a child first has intercourse also affect the likelihood that they would grow up in a home without their dads. What kind of genes could cause both? They could be ones that predispose a person to impulsivity, for instance, or sensation seeking. Or they could simply be genes that cause early puberty, suggests Dr Mendle — leading to early sexual experimentation, unintended pregnancy and a partner you never really chose and do not want to spend your life with.

Zulu businessman Milton Mbele, 44, is to marry the women aged between 22 and 35 in Ntlane village in Kwa-Zulu Natal and says he loves them all. The brides are to take their vows together, answering "we do" when asked if they take Mr Mbele as their husband. Polygamy is common in parts of Kwa-Zulu Natal. South Africa's President Jacob Zuma, an ethnic Zulu, has three wives. The four brides - Thobile Vilakazi, Zanele Langa, Baqinisile Mdlolo and Smangele Cele - all know each other. Mr Mbele has paid a total of 33 cows in ilobolo, or bride-price, for his soon-to-be-brides. He paid 10 cows for Ms Vilakazi, seven for Ms Langa and eight each for Ms Mdlolo and Ms Cele.

The demand follows allegations that Nigerians in China, especially those in jail, are being mistreated. The MPs asked the government to reject a request by the Chinese authorities to cremate the bodies of 30 Nigerians who have died in Chinese jails. There are an estimated 700 Nigerians currently in prison in China. Trade between Nigeria and China is booming and an estimated 20,000 Chinese people live in Nigeria. A similar number of people from across Africa are legally in China - and many more are thought to be there unofficially. In July 2009, a group of Africans staged a rare protest in the city of Guangzhou after a Nigerian man was reported to have died running away from police there. The Nigerian lawmakers want the government to conduct an audit to determine how many illegal Chinese immigrants there are in the country. The row comes after the Chinese government, through its embassy in Nigeria, sought permission to cremate the 30 corpses of Nigerian prisoners, saying their relatives cannot be traced.

There is a large variation in caloric intake and macronutrient preference between individuals and between ethnic groups, and these food intake patterns show a strong heritability. The transition to new food sources during the agriculture revolution around 11,000 years ago probably created selective pressure and shaped the genome of modern humans. One major player in energy homeostasis is the appetite-stimulating hormone neuropeptide Y, in which the stimulatory capacity may be mediated by the neuropeptide Y receptors 1, 2 and 5 (NPY1R, NPY2R and NPY5R). We assess association between variants in the NPY1R, NPY2R and NPY5R genes and nutrient intake in a cross-sectional, single-center study of 400 men aged 40 to 80 years, and we examine whether genomic regions containing these genes show signatures of recent selection in 270 HapMap individuals (90 Africans, 90 Asians, and 90 Caucasians) and in 846 Dutch bloodbank controls. Our results show that derived alleles in NPY1R and NPY5R are associated with lower carbohydrate intake, mainly because of a lower consumption of mono- and disaccharides. We also show that carriers of these derived alleles, on average, consume meals with a lower glycemic index and glycemic load and have higher alcohol consumption. One of these variants shows the hallmark of recent selection in Europe. Our data suggest that lower carbohydrate intake, consuming meals with a low glycemic index and glycemic load, and/or higher alcohol consumption, gave a survival advantage in Europeans since the agricultural revolution. This advantage could lie in overall health benefits, because lower carbohydrate intake, consuming meals with a low GI and GL, and/or higher alcohol consumption, are known to be associated with a lower risk of chronic diseases.

India's caste system stretches back thousands of years and was not largely a creation of colonial rule, as some historians claim, a genetic study has shown. Researchers analysed the DNA of 132 individuals with wide-ranging backgrounds from 25 diverse groups around India. They found evidence of strong inbreeding leading to genetic groups that had been isolated from each other for thousands of years. Most people had a mixture of genes from two ancient populations representing traditionally upper-caste individuals and everyone else. The first was genetically close to people from the Middle East, Central Asia and Europe, while the second had an 'Ancestral South Indian' lineage confined to the subcontinent. The research challenges the notion that India's notorious rigid caste system, with its priestly Brahmans and low-status 'untouchables', was largely manufactured by the British. The new findings published in the journal Nature indicate that, genetically at least, Indians had been divided long before the British arrived.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

African Americans have a significantly higher risk of developing potentially deadly Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT) and Pulmonary Embolism (PE) compared with other ethnic populations in the United States. Approximately 350,000 to 600,000 Americans suffer from DVT and PE each year, and at least 100,000 deaths may be directly or indirectly related to these diseases. African Americans have a remarkable 30% higher risk of DVT and PE than the white population.

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Steven J. Rosen’s defamation lawsuit against the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is now entering a critical phase. A series of cross-filings stakes out the critical court terrain. Rosen intends to show that obtaining and leveraging classified U.S. government information in the service of Israel is common practice at AIPAC. He claims it was unfair for AIPAC to fire and malign him in the press after he was indicted on espionage charges in 2005. AIPAC’s defense team is committed to getting the case thrown out on technicalities before it goes to trial early in 2010.

Lupus, also known as systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), a chronic inflammatory disease that often affects the joints, kidneys, blood and nervous system, is generally known to strike women more often than men and some ethnic groups more than others. Its severity can range from mild to fatal. The study was based on six years of data from lupus patients in Dallas-Fort Worth-area hospitals. The researchers found that white patients were half as likely as other ethnic groups to have the disease. Hispanic women tended to have the most severe lupus cases, which often were complicated by the presence of other diseases. These women, for example, had a 61% greater chance of having kidney inflammation - or nephritis - in addition to lupus, and a 55% greater likelihood of also having diabetes. In all, Hispanic and black patients with SLE were twice as likely as whites to also have nephritis, kidney failure and inflammation of the heart lining, all of which complicate the treatment and severity of the disease.

The odds of a white high-school student in America having a best friend of another race is only 8%. Those odds barely improve for the second-best friend, or the third-best, or the fifth. For blacks, the odds aren't much better: 85% of black kids' best friends are also black.

How much health benefit you get from physical exercise might depend on your gender, and your race, new research suggests. The work is based on data from more than 15,000 middle-aged African American and Caucasian men and women who have been participating since the late 1980s in the large Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study. According to a report in the Journal of Lipid Research, people who added about an hour of mild exercise per week or half an hour of moderate exercise had increased levels of heart-healthy HDL. In the study, "mild exercise" included such activities as walking for pleasure, bowling, or weight lifting. "Moderate exercise" could have been a more strenuous activity such as basketball, hiking, or modern dance. The research team, led by Dr. Keri Monda at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, also found that increased exercise generally produced significant decreases in harmful triglycerides, but only in Caucasians. Similar beneficial effects of exercise on HDL cholesterol and triglycerides have been found in other studies. Monda's team also discovered, however, that increased activity improved levels of artery-clogging LDL cholesterol in women, but not in men. Also, they found, added exercise brought total cholesterol levels down, but only in Black women. These variations in response, the research team says, "are for the most part" new. What's behind these differences? The researchers aren't sure, but they speculate that hormonal differences between men and women and genetic differences between races account for at least some of their findings.

The conventional view of human evolution and how early man colonised the world has been thrown into doubt by a series of stunning palaeontological discoveries suggesting that Africa was not the sole cradle of humankind. Scientists have found a handful of ancient human skulls at an archaeological site two hours from the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, that suggest a Eurasian chapter in the long evolutionary story of man. The skulls, jawbones and fragments of limb bones suggest that our ancient human ancestors migrated out of Africa far earlier than previously thought and spent a long evolutionary interlude in Eurasia – before moving back into Africa to complete the story of man. Experts believe fossilised bones unearthed at the medieval village of Dmanisi in the foothills of the Caucuses, and dated to about 1.8 million years ago, are the oldest indisputable remains of humans discovered outside of Africa.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Scientists have been trying to get an accurate estimate of the mutation rate for over 70 years. In 1935, one of the founders of modern genetics, JBS Haldane, studied a group of men with the blood disease hemophilia. He speculated that there would be about 150 new mutations in each human. Others have since looked at DNA in chimpanzees to try to produce general estimates for humans. However, next generation sequencing technology has enabled the scientists to produce a far more direct and reliable estimate. They looked at thousands of genes in the Y chromosomes of two Chinese men. They knew the men were distantly related, having shared a common ancestor who was born in 1805. By looking at the number of differences between the two men, and the size of the human genome, they were able to come up with an estimate of between 100 and 200 new mutations per person. Impressively, it seems that Haldane was right all along.

Somewhat less than 40% of people in the world retain the ability to digest lactose after childhood. The numbers are often given as close to 0% of Native Americans, 5% of Asians, 25% of African and Caribbean peoples, 50% of Mediterranean peoples and 90% of northern Europeans. Sweden has one of the world's highest percentages of lactase tolerant people. There's been a lot of research over the past decade looking at the genetic mutation that allows this subset of humanity to stay milk drinkers into adulthood. Now a group at University College London has shown that the mutation actually appeared about 7,500 years ago in dairy farmers who lived in a region between the central Balkans and central Europe, in what was known as the Funnel Beaker culture. The researchers used a computer to model the spread of lactase persistence, dairy farming, other food gathering practices and genes in Europe. Today, the highest proportion of people with lactase persistence live in Northwest Europe, especially the Netherlands, Ireland and Scandinavia. But the computer model suggests that dairy farmers carrying this gene variant probably originated in central Europe and then spread more widely and rapidly than non-dairying groups. Author Mark Thomas of University College London's dept of Genetics, Evolution and Environment says: "In Europe, a single genetic change...is strongly associated with lactase persistence and appears to have given people with it a big survival advantage." The European mutation is different from several lactase persistence genes associated with small populations of African peoples who historically have been cattle herders.